AT&T Aims to ‘Break the Vendor and Technology Lock-In’

AT&T is redoubling efforts to reduce the power and control that infrastructure vendors have held over the telecom industry for decades. The carrier this week made a series of announcements at the Open Networking Summit aimed at fostering a more open and interoperable approach to the hardware and software that powers radio access networks (RAN). The initial seed code for the 5G RAN Intelligent Controller, which AT&T co-developed with Nokia, was contributed to the Linux Foundation in partnership with the O-RAN Alliance as open source software. “This is really the first open source project that we’re launching. There will be more down the road, but this is really the first step here in terms of opening up the radio access network,” Andre Fuetsch, president of AT&T Labs and CTO at AT&T, told SDxCentral. “We want to be able to expose more of the controller so we can drive more visibility and more control. And when you have more visibility and control, then you have programmability,” he said. “It is going to break the vendor and technology lock in” and “open up a whole new level of interoperability. …